There can be few more difficult and unpalatable jobs than managing decline in a mature market. Yet that's what regional newspaper owners have been doing for at least a quarter of a century.

At first glance, that statement may appear ridiculous. Surely the problem is relatively new, prompted by the rise of the internet and exacerbated by the current advertising downturn? Publishers seem to agree. Tim Bowdler, chief executive of Johnston Press, has described it "an extraordinarily difficult market place". Sly Bailey, his counterpart at the largest regional company, Trinity Mirror, argued last week that the deterioration of advertising revenue is cyclical, implying that when it recovers, so will the fortunes of newspapers.

It's obvious that some of the vanished ads, in property for instance, are likely to return. But Bailey's statement, aimed understandably at putting some backbone into sceptical investors, conceals the underlying truth. The crisis for regional papers is structural, stretching back way before this current economic slump and prior to the ubiquity of computer screens. Let's define terms here. There is a noticeable difference between regional dailies and local weeklies. Most of the former are losing sales much faster— by at least 5% a year — and are therefore facing imminent demise while the majority of latter may well have a longer life span.

So what is it about the 75 or so regional dailies in England and Wales that makes them so vulnerable to closure? Note that I don't divide them into mornings or evenings. That delineation is no longer relevant because almost every e vening now publishes the bulk of its editions before lunch. Only in cities where there is both a morning and an evening — such as Birmingham, Bristol, Ipswich, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Norwich and Plymouth — are publication times problematical.

Otherwise, the days of early evening publishing are largely over, the first clue to the gradual change of culture that has robbed regional evenings of their readerships. That is less significant than the combination of three overlapping factors— population growth, geographical mobility and immigration. Added to the growing size of our cities and towns, the specific identity of people with the places in which they live has broken down when compared to the 1950s and 1960s.

Then there was a symbiotic relationship between newspapers and the largely stable communities they served. Papers were close to the people and the people were close to the papers as the bearers of a local history that was important to those whose families had lived within the area for generations.

Few papers can rely on these traditional audiences any longer and, it should be added, the problem is compounded when papers are staffed by journalists who have no links with the regions they serve. Add to this the specific problems that papers face in trying to report what is happening. Councils have lost many of their powers in the past 40 years, especially over budgets, as Westminster has centralised decision-making.

At the same time, councils have become more adept at preventing papers from reporting as intimately on the policymaking process as used to be the case. Restrictions on court reporting, paralleled by reductions in newspaper staffs, have also substantially reduced the former staple editorial diet. Petty crime has always been a seller. I want to avoid misguided nostalgia, however.The regional papers I once worked on — the Lancashire Evening Telegraph and the Brighton Evening Argus (both of which have recently deleted "evening" from their mastheads) — were a strange blend of content, offering a smattering of international and national news alongside local material of very varied quality. In trying to be comprehensive, the regional papers of old were often bland, comparing poorly to national titles. As they began to lose audiences, not least due to cover price rises, they often made the mistake of revamps modelled on the growing success of national red-top tabloids.

In place of blandness came sensation, and the effect was to turn off more readers more quickly. Many titles have since see-sawed between populism and a semblance of seriousness. Finding an editorial agenda that appeals across social class, education and other demographics, such as age and race, has proved impossible.

A single paper simply cannot satisfy an increasingly fragmented modern British population. The popularity of the net has, of course, accelerated the overall structural decline. So what can be done? Trinity Mirror's response at its Birmingham Post, now selling about 12,700 copies a day, has been to turn it into a niche product by switching it to a tabloid format and focussing on business. That's a big leap in the dark because Birmingham's business community may not be large enough to sustain high enough sales and the paper could find it a stretch to provide enough appropriate material to make it required reading.

By contrast, the Guardian Media Group's Manchester Evening News (MEN) is taking a very different route by trying to win back a large audience through costly hybrid distribution. It both sells copies and gives them away at various points in the city. The result has been a huge circulation boost, to a total of 161,500 copies a day, of which 83,700 are distributed free. Editor Paul Horrocks says the new headline figure has attracted display advertising, which provides extra pagination, allowing the paper to have a broad enough editorial agenda to please all kinds of reader.

No wonder rival media firms have been queuing up in recent weeks to visit the MEN office and talk through the experiment. I'm a little more sceptical, but the figures speak for themselves.